Married Into Mayhem

Chapter 1

Fatherhood had taught me a lot over the last few months: how to change a diaper, how to survive on too-little sleep, and when it came to the sound of a baby crying, my hearing was far better than I ever realized.

Or maybe it was worse, considering I was pretty sure this one was a phantom cry. Living in a constant state of exhaustion and anxiety was to blame.

My head snapped up to the stands, searching for the sound. I shouldn’t have been able to hear over the crack of sticks on ice and roaring fans at the crowded arena. And yet, I couldn’t focus on anything but looking for my daughter.

Except she wasn’t here.

Tonight was the Denver Yeti’s season opener, and an away game. Logically, I knew it wasn’t Leena. But my brain was currently in a screw logic mood.

I kept looking for her, searching for the full-body explosion of too many emotions that accompanied her cries.

“Mikko!” someone shouted from behind me.

My attention snapped back to the ice, only to watch the Chicago Storm’s right winger blow right by me, headed for the net. My teammate Logan raced to intercept the puck, but that was my job, not his.

“What the hell, man?” he shouted when he flew by me, but it was too little, too late. Their winger squared up against our goalie, Nate Kozak, then sank the puck over his glove hand, right into the net.

The goal buzzer sounded, and my ears rang.

Fuck.

I came off the ice with the line change, frustration boiling under my skin. Even without looking at him, I could feel Coach’s eyes on me. And who could blame him?

I’d be glaring at the guy who missed coverage all preseason, too.

“Maybe we should go back to Pixie Sticks between periods, yeah?” Logan said as he walked next to me down the tunnel after the period ended. “Do you need a little orange slice pick-me-up?”

“Pixie Sticks?” Kozak said. “Are you 12?”

“Humor-wise? Yes.” Logan grinned, then squeezed my shoulder and walked into the locker room.

I grunted because I heard what he wasn’t saying.

I’d fucked up.

I’d let them down.

I was letting everyone down today.

The image of Leena crying stuck in my head, sobbing in my Mom’s arms when I’d left for the plane last night. I’d tried calling Mom before the game, but she hadn’t answered—not that that was unusual.

Guilt ate at me, but I knew the likelihood she was still crying 24 hours later was practically impossible. But then again, if someone had told me three months ago that I was a dad, I’d have said that was impossible too.

I sat down at my locker, every worst-case scenario playing out in my head.

What if Leena was so upset she tried to climb out of her crib, and Mom couldn’t get there fast enough?

Or worse, what if something happened to Mom, and she wasn’t able to get to Leena at all?

She’d been in a wheelchair for over 25 years, and my penthouse was plenty accessible to her, but there were so many factors at play here, so many things out of my control, and I was a plane-ride away from being able to help them.

I tugged at my neckline, my equipment suffocating me.

“Laaksonen!” Coach Tremblay stormed into the locker room. “What was that?”

I stared at my skates, sweat dripping off my brow and onto the rubber mats lining the Storm’s visiting locker room. My jaw ticked, but words were lost to me. Because what was that?

“Mistake,” I said, feeling all eyes on me.

“Damn right, it was a mistake. You let O’Connell right by you, then stood there and watched as he scored. Play like that again and I’m cutting your minutes.”

I heard him, but my head was a thousand miles away.

“It’s cool.” Logan nudged my arm. “He was testing out a theory about Jedi mind control over our opponents. Now we know it doesn’t work. Glad we got that out of the way now, right buddy?”

I didn’t answer. Didn’t look at him. Did nothing but stare at the floor and breathe, which I was also bad at.

He elbowed me in the side. “Should I say it in Klingon?”

“That’s Star Trek,” Kozak said from across the room. “It’d be Shyriiwook if you wanted to go with Chewbacca. Feels right for Meeks, right?”

“Spoken like a true goalie,” Logan said, and several people chuckled. “How would I say, Hey Mikko, don’t suck?”

Kozy opened his mouth to answer, but Coach held up his clipboard. “I don’t care what language we say it in, that was absolute garbage, and I don’t want to see it again.”

I yanked at the straps holding my chest pads on. Everything felt too tight, too constricting as Coach kept talking, laying out strategies for the next period.

I knew I needed to listen, to focus, but I couldn’t stop replaying the moment I’d looked into the stands and then back at the ice.

What a perfect example of how I was failing everyone, all at once.

Being part of a team sport meant I had to pull my weight, or we all suffered the consequences. But at home, I didn’t have a team.

It was just me and Leena.

If I let her down…

Fuck.

My body vibrated with adrenaline, trying to resist the temptation to pull my phone out of my locker and call my mom again.

Three months ago, that wasn’t a concern. Sure, I worried about my mom, but she lived in Finland, halfway around the world from me, and no amount of worrying about her could do a damn thing.

Now, nothing was the same, all because of one phone call.

One little girl left on my parents’ doorstep.

One note, claiming she was mine.

Now, I was a single dad to a 19-month-old. Or was she 20 now? That seemed like something a good parent was supposed to know. But then again, every single day I seemed to come to another realization that maybe I wasn’t a good parent.

Maybe I was failing at this harder than I’d ever failed at anything before.

My breaths sawed out of me. Every piece of equipment strapped to my body felt constricting, sucking the air out of my lungs.

With each passing second, my vision tunneled until I focused on a roll of tape on the floor, everything else fading into the distance. My ears buzzed with static, only the sound of my racing heartbeat audible above the noise.

I yanked on my jersey, pulling it over my head, then ripped at the rest of the pads on my body.

Logan stood in front of me, his mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

I pushed him out of the way, standing up so fast the room spun, only to see Frankie Rhodes, our head trainer, hurrying across the room toward me.

“I’m fine,” I growled, but I felt like I was about to pass out.

Frankie raised one dark brow, then pointed at the bench beneath me. And dammit, I sat back down.

Of all the people in the room, both players and staff, our head trainer was probably the only guy bigger than me. He had his arms crossed over his broad chest, looking every bit the former linebacker turned trainer he was.

Sound returned to me as I sat there. Frankie dropped into a squat in front of me and grabbed my wrist, pinching my pulse point. “I forgot Thor doesn’t need to breathe like the rest of us. Or is it Chewbacca now?”

I focused on his fingers, the color dark against my own clammy skin, trying to push away the panic. “Leena,” I started, my voice sounding wrong. “She’s—”

“Would you like to check on her?” Frankie said, still concentrating on my heart rate.

“On it.” Logan reached over my head into the locker holding my personal items. He swiped across my phone screen, then held it in front of my face until it unlocked.

Before I had time to question what was happening, my mother’s voice echoed through the locker room. “Mikko?”

“Nah, it’s your favorite Yeti,” Logan said. His dark hair was wet and curling against his forehead, and he swept it back from his face with a grin. “The Giant’s right here, though, and—”

I pulled my hand out of Frankie’s grip and reached for my phone. “Is she still upset?”

My mom smiled at me through the video call, but it was all wrong.

“What?” My heart rate sped up more somehow. “Is Leena okay? Are you okay? I knew I shouldn’t have left.”

“Breathe, Miksu.” She put her phone in her lap, then pushed herself down the hallway from my living room to Leena’s bedroom, nudging open the door with the footrest of her wheelchair.

The wheels squeaked softly as she moved toward the modified crib, making it so my mom could access Leena quickly if she needed to. “She’s perfect.”

The camera flipped, and there was my daughter.

Leena was fast asleep, her dark lashes splayed across chubby cheeks, white-blonde hair curling at her nape.

She was on her stomach, butt in the air like she so often did, cheek pressed into the mattress.

My name was written across the back of a Denver Yetis onesie my former teammate Beckett Conway had gifted her, dressed for game day.

Her pacifier moved in and out of her mouth, soothing her in the same way having my eyes on her seemed to soothe me.

She was so perfect, so pure, and so very dependent on me to get my shit together.

I couldn’t pinpoint the feeling in my chest every time I saw her face. Was it adoration for the precious little girl she was? Anger that I’d already missed the first year of her life? Guilt that I was missing more?

Maybe.

But with every beat of my racing heart, all of it was overshadowed.

Fear that I was all she had.

Worry that I would, or already had, mess her up.

Panic that something would happen while we were apart, and the only person left in her life would let her down too.

“She’s fine, my boy.” Mom set the phone in her lap and made her way back out to the hallway. “Are you?”

And wasn’t that the question?

“Working on it,” Frankie said. “Thank you, Mrs. Laaksonen. I’ll take care of him.”

“We’ll be waiting for you,” my mom said before she hung up, her expression more worried than before. Which was great—now I could add a burden to my mother to the list of failures.

Frankie sat down next to me, then picked up my hand again. “Do you have one of those cameras that looks into her crib?”

“A baby monitor.” I looked down at my palm. “Are we holding hands now?”

“I’d like that, thanks for asking,” Frankie said, still not letting go of me. “I love a man comfortable in his masculinity.”